pgAdmin 4 is a rewrite of the popular pgAdmin3 management tool for the PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org) database.

In the following documentation and examples, $PGADMIN4_SRC/ is used to denote the top-level directory of a copy of the pgAdmin source tree, either from a tarball or a git checkout.

pgAdmin 4 is written as a web application with Python (Flask) on the server side and ReactJS, HTML5 with CSS for the client side processing and UI.

Although developed using web technologies, pgAdmin 4 can be deployed either on a web server using a browser, or standalone on a workstation. The runtime/ subdirectory contains an Electron-based runtime application intended to allow this, which will fork a Python server process and display the UI.

1. Install Node.js 20 and above (https://nodejs.org/en/download)
2. yarn (https://yarnpkg.com/getting-started/install)
3. Python 3.9 and above (https://www.python.org/downloads/)
4. PostgreSQL server (https://www.postgresql.org/download)

Start by enabling Corepack, if it isn't already; this will add the yarn binary to your PATH:

corepack enable

pgAdmin is dependent on a number of third-party JavaScript libraries. These, along with its own JavaScript code, CSS code and images must be compiled into a "bundle" which is transferred to the browser for execution and rendering. This is far more efficient than simply requesting each asset as it is needed by the client.

To create the bundle, you will need the 'yarn' package management tool to be installed. Then, you can run the following commands on a *nix system to download the required packages and build the bundle:

$ cd $PGADMIN4_SRC
$ make install-node
$ make bundle

On Windows systems (where "make" is not available), the following commands can be used:

C:\> cd $PGADMIN4_SRC\web
C:\$PGADMIN4_SRC\web> yarn install
C:\$PGADMIN4_SRC\web> yarn run bundle

In order to run the Python code, a suitable runtime environment is required. Python version 3.9 and later are currently supported. It is recommended that a Python virtual environment is set up for this purpose, rather than using the system Python environment. On Linux and Mac systems, the process is fairly simple - adapt as required for your distribution: